Slacker Hunting!
Well, I was doing a little ego surfing on Google this evening and lo and behold, this site has the #1 Google spot for the phrase "slacker manager." Shouldn’t be a big surprise, but still…#1 out of 25,000 hits is kinda fun.
Now for the ominous part of this post. One of the results was an essay called Slaying The Slacker (pdf). Gah! And it’s chock full of bowhunting metaphors for hunting, wounding and killing slackers! GAH!
Actually, the article is really well done (except for the creepy hunting metaphors) and is full of great advice for protecting the organization from chronic underachievers (I even saved a copy of the article. Heresy!). The author, a guy named Craig Gilliland, brings up some solid points about how and where to document poor performance. He reviews some of those sneaky slacker tricks and offers countermeasures. He notes the importance of having employees assigned to tasks that compliment their skills and abilities. Lotsa good stuff there.
However. For all the effort he put into writing such a serious article on what amounts to fine tuning organizational or departmental performance, I think he seriously misses the boat when it comes to the risks of "overimproving" the department/organization. Too much emphasis on slacker hunting and fine tuning efficiencies will drive out the true performers as well as the slackers. It’s a common oversight, but a serious flaw in the essay, nonetheless.
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1 opinion for Slacker Hunting!
Tony Boyle
Jan 11, 2006 at 10:20 am
Interesting post and related article I agree with some of the points,
however slacker hunting although somthing to be Cognizant of it’s not the best way to fine tune any organisation.
I have been in HR for about 6 years and like most hr people I have been to hundreds of day courses and training boht online and in person and I find that focusing on the “slackers” is far less fruitful than focusing on the
middle ie. I would far rather focus on publicly rewarding productivity and performance through incentives rather than the HR police or hunter approach.
Think about it if you reward those who deserve it in an open very transparent manner the “slackers are far more likley to respond to missed opportunity instead of feeling watched or micro managed.
But thats just my two cents.
cheers
Tony